Growing a business is a challenge in any environment. Growing a business around a core that involves WordPress has specific challenges inherent to its fundamentals. WordPress, of course, is that popular platform which began its life as a way for individuals to blog, but its value and ease of entry quickly allowed it to evolve into a Content Management System (CMS) that commands the attention of businesses large and small. A representative sample, yet far from a complete listing, can be found at WordPress.org (http://wordpress.org/showcase/).

Although WordPress is Open Source Software, which is free to download and use, the sites listed above could hardly have been created for free. Each of the sites have many hours invested in their development, and of course, time is money. To circumvent the time sink of creating functionality and avoid recreating the wheel, most developers prefer to pay for premium plugins and themes. These plugins are used alongside the myriad free plugins and themes available at WordPress.org.

Given that so much can be done with WordPress for free, this bias persists in the minds of many clients. The question is often why pay for something that is free? The answer is the same one that every marketplace has provided for millennia. When early hunter-gatherers wanted some grains to go along with their fish or berries, the answer from the guy who had the grains wasn’t how about I just give you what I got for nothing. The evolution of currency became useful for the grain guy who already had plenty of fish and berries, but was willing to part with some grains in exchange for some valuable placeholder in case the folks with meat or vegetables happened by.

And so it comes to be that I am very thankful to be a part of this micro-community where sharing is a very important underlying value, but there are also plenty of opportunities to trade your time and expertise for the placeholder we call, today, money. Sure there are times when a client may not understand the services of WP-Valet and their intention, but this becoming increasingly rare. Yesterday I had a conversation with a potential client who objected to an express service fee. His line of reasoning was:

[M]ove to the front of the line for $100. What? So you’re willing to sell-out the hard-working folks who have contracted your services for a measly hundred bucks?

To be clear, our migration services are offered with a 10-day delivery. In most cases this is just fine for our clients, but under certain crisis situations, such as current hosting running out, a client may elect to have this process expedited to a 3-day delivery for a fee. Why would we charge this fee? I can assure you it has nothing to do with selling out hard-working folks. Rather, it entails a different delivery method from our 10-day system. Instead of dispersing the workload to five different Valets, each of whom have their own area of expertise, we assemble the crack team, usually two Valets, to see the whole process to completion. To embrace this disruption, we associate a fee with it. For further explanation, please consult the nearest FedEx representative.